ANC rejects claims of cabal in Cape Town Municipality

The ANC Western Cape rejects any claim that a cabal exists which runs the Cape Town Municipality.

In fact, this Council has been run in a way which has for the first time encouraged citizens to even have a say in the way in which the budget is put together.

At the same time we would be the first to acknowledge that racism still exists and that the Western Cape has been a particularly harsh place for Africans to live.

The Apartheid government has invested much resources to deny Africans the right to live here and to walk here. It is therefor the right of people to bring their complaints to bodies such as the Human Rights Commission. This can only be helpful to root out racism.

It is unfortunate that this group has chosen to organise themselves as an “African pressure group” seeking to improve their job prospects by conducting their campaigns destructively. The ANC will never fuel any perception of entitlement to positions by individuals using ethnicity in a narrow, self-serving way.

Our policy of affirmative action is a genuine attempt to advance the claims of ALL disadvantaged communities. Within this policy we strive for representivity with an ability to perform the job and to deliver a service.

We therefor accept that we have skills among people disadvantaged by apartheid, and it is people of colour, women and the disabled who should deliberately be affirmed.

We cannot be satisfied with representative at management levels until it starts to reflect the demographic profile of our province and city.

But the process of building representative is fundamentally better than – and preferable to – a simple claim of entitlement.